Beyond the Reading Room

We are very pleased to announce a new online exhibit from the Special Collections Library: Shakespeare on Page and Stage: A Celebration. It is a virtual record of the physical exhibit that took place in the Audubon Room of the Hatcher Library from January 11 to April 27, 2016. As the title playfully suggests, the exhibit is a historical journey through different versions of Shakespeare’s plays as they were edited for publication or interpreted for the stage.

We are very pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibit at the Special Collections Library. The display showcases recent acquisitions that strengthen our extraordinary holdings in the areas of radical literature, transportation history, film, rare books, culinary history, Islamic manuscripts, children's literature, and Judaica.

The audience for children’s literature goes far beyond ages 2-12. The words and images of these books linger in our minds long after we’ve outgrown the suggested age ranges. Below are a few favorite children’s books from the staff of the Special Collections Library, featuring titles present in our Children’s Literature Collection. Celebrate Children’s Book Week with one of these suggestions, or share your own best-loved books in the comments!

Watermark Wednesdays are back with Paschal Lamb motifs in watermarked papers from the Islamic Manuscripts Collection.

The exhibit Shakespeare on Page and Stage: A Celebration (Audubon Room, January 11-April 27, 2016) showcases both the textual and performance history of Shakespeare’s plays. This post looks at a particularly dramatic instance of Shakespeare forgery in the late eighteenth century. William Henry Ireland, the son of publisher and Shakespeare collector Samuel Ireland. Samuel and William Henry Ireland had a relationship that was strained at best, and as a young man, William Henry wished desperately to please and impress the elder Ireland. And indeed Samuel Ireland was very pleased when his son began bringing home manuscript material in Shakespeare’s hand, supposedly from the home of a gentleman who wished to remain anonymous.

A day like today, on April 22 , Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra died in Madrid four hundred years ago. To commemorate this date, I have revisited our collection of early editions of Cervantes's works, selecting for this post the eighteenth-century edition of Don Quixote that played a major role to canonize Cervantes as a global literary figure.

Please join Rebecca Chung (UMSI), Fritz Swanson (Wolverine Press), and Justin Schell (Shapiro Design Lab), for conversation about the Wolverine Press's edition of a famous sheet of paper: the G gathering from the Q2 (second quarto) of Hamlet, which includes Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” speech, his repudiation of Ophelia with “Get thee a Nunry,” and his speech to the players, “sute the action to the word.”

As part of the ongoing series of events commemorating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death this term, join us on Thursday, April 7th for a lecture by Professor Joseph Loewenstein at 4:00pm in the Hatcher Gallery.

The exhibit Shakespeare on Page and Stage: A Celebration (Audubon Room, January 11-April 27, 2016) showcases both the textual and performance history of Shakespeare’s plays. This post looks in greater detail at the work of costume and set designer Zelma Weisfeld, professor of Theatre and Drama at the University of Michigan from 1960-1988. During those 28 years, Weisfeld contributed to more than 120 theatre and opera productions, including several Shakespeare plays.

Our featured book is a copy of the second edition of the famous sixteenth-century blood-letting treatise for barber-surgeons, Discourses of Pietro Paolo Magni of Piacenza on how to bleed, attach leeches and cups, perform massages and blistering to the human body (Discorsi di Pietro Paolo Magni piacentino sopra il mondo di sanguinare, attaccar le sanguisugue, & le ventose far le fregagione & vessicatorij a corpi humani). It was published in Rome in 1586.